Introducing OSEH Visiting Scholar: Anselmo Matusse

Oslo School of Environmental Humanities is excited to welcome Anselmo Matusse as a visiting scholar! He will visit OSEH through the INTPART project Strengthening Environmental Anthropology Research and Education Through Interdisciplinary Methods and Collaborations.

From the left to the right, Anselmo, Calisto and Ernesto talking about Mount Mabu

From the left to the right, Anselmo, Calisto and Ernesto talking about Mount Mabu. Photo: Anselmo Matusse

I am excited to be joining OSEH for a month (June) as a visiting scholar. While at OSEH, I intend to prepare one article for publication and use this unique opportunity to meet and engage with other researchers from OSEH and other humanities colleagues. I am an anthropologist with a background in environmental humanities, digital humanities, and education.

I finished my PhD studies in June 2021 at the University of Cape Town within the Environmental Humanities South Cluster.  My PhD thesis focused on the changing relations between residents and Mount Mabo in Zambézia Province, northern Mozambique, in the context of NGOs and nature conservationists’ attempts to turn the mountain into a formally protected area after a group of British scientists had “found” the mountain in 2005 using Google Earth. I carried out ethnography in three rural communities to understand the various meanings and forms of relationships they held with the mountain, forest, and land, including economic, spiritual, social, and philosophical and contrasted them with those of the NGOs, state, and scientists to open room for a dialogue between them.

Anselmo Matusse in the field
Photo: Anselmo Matusse

I am currently co-editing a volume titled “Contested Ecologies II: Africa’s struggles with neoliberal environmentalism” with Lesley Green and Frank Matose, who supervised my thesis. The volume seeks to bring African scholars’ voices and stories that could help build an African environmentalism based on local ways of knowing and caring for animals, soils, forests, sea, wetlands, rivers, lakes, and deserts and advance climate justice and rural development.

Throughout my PhD studies and research, I have had the privilege of connecting to networks such as the Environmental Humanities South (EHS) at the University of Cape Town, the Social Sciences Research Council (SSRC), the National Geographic Society (NGS), and the Wilton Park Foundation that bring actors from various backgrounds to reflect on the climate crisis, poverty, and conflicts in Africa. I am also part of Europeana and Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries and Uppsala’s Centre for Environment and Development Studies–CEMUS. Those networks have helped me shape a research path conducive to critiquing the extractive human-nature relations and reframing development creatively and collaboratively.

I hold a bachelor’s degree in English Language Teaching and another BA in Anthropology from Eduardo Mondlane University in Mozambique. I hold one master’s degree in Environmental Science from Linköping University and another in Digital Humanities from Linnaeus University in Sweden. 

Published June 15, 2022 1:43 PM - Last modified May 3, 2023 2:21 PM